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Article Excerpt
The Harvard University administration during the 1930s, led by President James Bryant Conant, ignored numerous opportunities to take a principled stand against the Hitler regime and its antisemitic outrages, and contributed to Nazi Germany's efforts to improve its image in the West. Its lack of concern about Nazi antisemitism was shared by many influential Harvard alumni and student leaders. In warmly welcoming Nazi leaders to the Harvard campus, inviting them to prestigious, high-profile social events, and striving to build friendly relations with thoroughly Nazified universities in Germany, while denouncing those who protested against these actions, Harvard's administration and many of its student leaders offered important encouragement to the Hitler regime as it intensified its persecution of Jews and expanded its military strength.
The few scholars who previously addressed this subject devoted insufficient attention to antisemitism in the Harvard administration and student body, and underestimate the university's complicity in the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. William M. Tuttle Jr., to be sure, criticizes Conant's unwillingness to help place German scholars exiled by the Nazis at Harvard, calling this "a failure of compassion." Morton and Phyllis Keller, in their recent history of Harvard, similarly describe its administration as slow to appoint refugees from Nazism to the faculty, particularly Jews. They describe Conant as "shar[ing] the mild antisemitism common to his social group and time," but then go on to state that an alleged commitment to meritocracy "made him more ready to accept able Jews as students and faculty." The Kellers acknowledge that under Conant Harvard restricted the number of Jewish students admitted and hired few Jewish professors, so the trend toward meritocracy was limited. Tuttle, while conceding that Conant publicly criticized the Hitler regime only for suppressing academic freedom, and "ignor[ed] other and related Nazi crimes," nonetheless praises him as "one of the more outspoken anti-Nazis in the United States from 1933 until World War II." This, however, was hardly the case. (1)
From 1933, when he assumed the presidency of America's oldest and most prestigious university, through 1937, Conant failed to speak out against Nazism on many occasions when it really mattered. He was publicly silent during the visit of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe to Boston in May 1934, some of whose crew Harvard entertained. He welcomed the high Nazi official Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl to the June 1934 Harvard commencement. In March 1935, the Harvard administration permitted Nazi Germany's consul general in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika emblem in the university chapel. Conant sent a delegate from Harvard to the University of Heidelberg's 550th anniversary pageant in June 1936, and extended warm greetings to the Georg-August University in Goettingen on its two-hundredth anniversary in June 1937. In providing a friendly welcome to Nazi leader Hanfstaengl, President Conant and others prominently affiliated with Harvard communicated to the Hitler government that boycotts intended to destroy Jewish businesses, the dismissal of Jews from the professions, and savage beatings of Jews were not their concern. Conant's biographer, James Hershberg, trivialized Hanfstaengl's 1934 visit to Harvard by calling it "farcical"; it was, in fact, highly dangerous. (2)
President Conant remained publicly indifferent to the persecution of Jews in Europe and failed to speak out against it until after Kristallnacht, in November 1938. He was determined to build friendly ties with the Universities of Heidelberg and Goettingen, even though they had expelled their Jewish faculty members and thoroughly Nazified their curricula, constructing a "scholarly" foundation for vulgar antisemitism, which was taught as "racial science." The anniversary ceremonies in which Harvard participated, by sending a representative or friendly greetings, were simply brown shirt pageants designed to glorify the Nazi regime. James Hershberg admits that Conant "dignified a crudely Nazified spectacle," but ascribes his eagerness to do so to "fear of igniting controversy," rather than to insensitivity to Jewish suffering. (3) Harvard invited Nazi academics to its September 1936 Tercentenary Celebration, which it held on Rosh Hashonah. (Conant ignored numerous requests not to schedule it on a Jewish High Holiday.) During this period, Harvard engaged in an academic student exchange program with Nazi universities, refusing to heed the call for a boycott. Conant also displayed impatience with, and often contempt for, Jewish and other activists determined to publicly expose Nazi barbarism.
To be sure, Conant did express formal opposition to Nazism, and never assumed the role of public apologist for the Hitler regime, as did the chancellor of American University in Washington, D.C., Joseph Gray, who in August 1936 returned from Europe filled with praise for the "New Germany." Chancellor Gray declared that Hitler had restored hope to a troubled nation, preventing it from going the way of strife-torn Spain. "Everybody is working in Germany," he gushed, liberal education was available, and the cities were "amazingly clean," without beggars. But even Gray a year and a half later signed the petition denouncing Poland's 1937 introduction of segregated seating in universities for Jewish students, while Conant did not. (4)
President Conant's behavior was certainly influenced by the anti-Jewish prejudice he harbored. His predecessor as Harvard's president, A. Lawrence Lowell, had voiced his antisemitism publicly, notably during the controversy in 1922 surrounding his proposal that Harvard introduce a formal quota to reduce Jewish enrollment. In justifying a quota, President Lowell, a vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, had declared that "a strong race feeling on the part of the Jews" was a significant cause of the "rapidly growing anti-Semitic feeling in this country." (5) Lowell managed thus to blame the Jews for antisemitism. Conant, then a Harvard chemistry professor, had voted in favor of the anti-Jewish quota at a special faculty meeting. Harvard restricted Jewish enrollment during Conant's presidency in the 1930s using more subtle methods than a formal quota. (6)
Conant's antisemitism is evident in his correspondence with the chemical director of the Du Pont corporation, who sought his advice in September 1933 about whether to hire the Jewish chemist Max Bergmann, whom Germany's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute of Leather Research had discharged after the Nazis assumed power. Du Pont was impressed with Bergmann's record as a research chemist, but worried that he might possess undesirable personality and physical traits that Du Pont executives, and President Conant, associated with Jews. Chemistry was a well-established scientific field from which Jews had for the most part been excluded in the United States. (7) Although President Conant could have exerted his influence against chemistry's highly restrictive approach to Jews, when given the opportunity, he chose not to do so. In fact, he was not just silent in the face of discrimination; he actively collaborated in it.
Du Pont's chemical director knew that Bergmann had "a great reputation" as an organic chemist, Conant's field, but contacted Harvard's president because the corporation's London representative had alerted him that he was "decidedly of the Jewish type." If this were the case, Du Pont feared it could adversely affect its relations with American universities. Conant responded that Bergmann was "certainly very definitely of the Jewish type-rather heavy," probably dogmatic, with "none of the earmarks of genius," a view he admitted many American chemists did not share. He recommended that Du Pont not hire Bergmann. (8) Thus given the opportunity to stand up against bigotry and exclusion, even behind closed doors, in a way that would cost him nothing, he chose to do the opposite: to shore up anti-Jewish prejudice. When he died a decade later, the New York Times identified Bergmann as "one of the leading organic chemists in the world." (9)
Conant reacted differently a few weeks later when Sir William Pope, director of the chemical laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote to him on behalf of a non-Jewish chemist, Wilhelm Schlenk of Berlin University in Germany. Pope was hoping that Conant might help secure an academic position for Schlenk in the United States. Berlin University had penalized Schlenk because he had attempted to assist Fritz Haber, one of Germany's top chemists and a Christian convert from Judaism, when the Nazis forced him out of his position. Pope assured Conant that Schlenk had "no Jewish blood." He was, in fact, "one of the most charming men" Pope knew. Schlenk had never been associated with "socialist or communistic politics," involvement in which, Pope asserted, was "the cause of the disgrace" of many German Jewish chemists. Conant did not challenge this claim. For an individual who was not "of the Jewish type," unlike Bergmann, Conant indicated a readiness to help. (10)
At the very beginning of Nazi rule in 1933, Boston's Jews mobilized in a massive parade and rally to protest against antisemitic persecution in Germany, but Conant and the other local university presidents did not take part. The November demonstration, sponsored by the New England branch of the American Jewish Congress, was staged in the Dorchester/ Mattapan section, where most of Boston's Jews were concentrated, only a few miles from Cambridge. But unlike many of Boston's leaders, Conant did not even send greetings, much less speak. (11) By contrast, the president of Harvard during the next several years sent greetings to German universities when they were staging anniversary commemorations, even though they were clearly intended as Nazi propaganda spectacles, and American newspapers described them as such. Conant did not endorse the boycott of German goods that began in 1933, which was well-organized in Boston, or call for Harvard not to buy them.
Nor did President Conant express support for the resolution that Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland introduced in Congress in January 1934 condemning Nazi oppression of Jews in Germany, and asking President Roosevelt to inform the Hitler government that this country was profoundly distressed about its antisemitic measures. Senator Tydings noted that the United States government had denounced antisemitic persecution in foreign countries at least nine times between 1840 and 1919. Few of America's academic leaders endorsed the resolution, and it remained bottled up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (12)
William M. Tuttle, Jr., notes that President Conant was "timid at crucial moments," but minimizes his failure to take a consistent stand against the Nazis by arguing that "he was not alone in his reticence." Tuttle claims that "leaders with constituencies to serve," including university presidents, union leaders, and politicians, "were notoriously silent in the 1930s." Yet there were still some who took a principled stand. President William Green and the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) vigorously promoted the boycott of German goods almost from its inception in 1933. They specifically denounced "the ruthless persecution of Germany's Jewish population." Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot prominently associated himself with the boycott from the beginning. Senator Tydings pressed vigorously for the U.S. government to confront Nazi Germany about its antisemitic persecution, and helped bring it to wider public attention by introducing his resolution. Other leading politicians, like New York's Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, frequently denounced Nazi antisemitism, and even U.S. Representative John McCormack of Irish American South Boston sent greetings to the American Jewish Congress's November 1933 Dorchester/ Mattapan rally against Nazi antisemitism. (13)
The university over which Conant presided remained largely indifferent to the persecution of Germany's Jews, and displayed a shocking lack of awareness of Nazism. This is best revealed in a mock debate Harvard held on Adolf Hitler's conduct in late October 1934. After two teams of Harvard undergraduates presented arguments, a panel consisting largely of Harvard professors acquitted the Fuehrer on two of four charges. The panel "ruled out as irrelevant" the subject of Hitler's "persecution of Jews." By a 4-1 vote, it found Hitler guilty of having General Kurt von Schleicher killed without trial. Von Schleicher had preceded Hitler as chancellor, and was executed by the S.S. during the "Blood Purge" of June 30, 1934, directed primarily against the S.A. leadership. The panel also found Hitler guilty, by a 3-2 vote, of sending men to concentration camps without definite charges. But by 3-2 votes, it acquitted Hitler of "invading the sanctity of homes without warrant" and of ordering the murder of seventy-seven Germans in the June 30 purge. The panel accepted Hitler's own figure of seventy-seven slain; it was probably at least twice that, and may have exceeded a thousand. (14)
Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, strongly condemned another mock trial of Hitler staged in New York the previous spring, that had devoted serious attention to his persecution of the Jews and found him guilty of "a crime against civilization." Sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, the AFL, and approximately fifty other Jewish and liberal groups, it was held at Madison Square Garden before 20,000 people. Twenty "witnesses for public opinion" had presented "The Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism." They included former New York governor Al Smith, New York mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the honorary president of the American Jewish Congress, AFL vice-president Matthew Woll, and Senator Millard Tydings. Chancellor Harry Woodburn Chase of New York University explicitly denounced the Nazis for denying Jews the right to study and teach in universities. He declared that it was the duty of all "teachers, scientists, and men of letters" to "resist with all their power" Nazi Germany's higher education policies--a view not shared by Conant or the other presidents of elite universities. The event's organizers had invited Germany's ambassador, Hans Luther, to defend Hitler, but he had declined. The Crimson dismissed the Madison Square Garden mock trial as having "proved nothing," because Hitler had not been provided with a defense. Moreover, it claimed that the audience, containing many Jews, was "rabidly prejudiced." (15)
Almost a year and a half later, in March 1936, one of Harvard's leading history professors, William L. Langer, a renowned authority on the world war, vigorously defended Nazi Germany's recent occupation of the Rhineland, and disputed the charge that Hitler was a militarist. Hitler's retaking of the Rhineland removed a critical obstacle blocking a German military invasion in the west. The victorious powers in the world war had demilitarized the Rhineland to...
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